If You’re Poor, Tighten Those Chastity Belts

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/10/05/if-youre-poor-tighten-those-chastity-belts/

by Tula Connell, Oct 5, 2007

This is a cross post from the Firedoglake blog.

Barbara Ehrenreich, who has spent a lifetime championing working people and the decent-paying wages, affordable health care and secure pensions they deserve, made the following observation:

When the original welfare reform bill was proposed , it contained $100 million for chastity training.

This addition to the welfare reform bill, Ehrenreich notes, reflected the ruling class’s preoccupation with the sexual and social habits of the poor. She also might have added, such a misplaced emphasis purposely ignores the structural economic conditions behind poverty.

The always-provocative Ehrenreich spoke this week at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) as part of a forum, Alleviating Poverty, the latest in the progressive think tank’s “Agenda for Shared Prosperity” series. Ehrenreich, of course, knows firsthand about poverty. She spent months working at several low-wage jobs, such as an “associate” at Wal-Mart, experiences she documents in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

Ehrenreich, EPI President Jared Bernstein and Nancy Cauthen, deputy director of Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty, hashed out potential solutions to a problem this nation should not be having on such a large scale: People work full-time and can’t support themselves or their families.

Cauthen cites the example of a not-so-hypothetical single mother with two children living in Chicago working full-time at an $8-an-hour job. At the end of the year, after bills are paid, with nothing spent on extraneous items like savings, the family is $18,000 in debt. And yet this single mother’s salary actually is more than the new minimum wage, which by 2009 will be $5.75 an hour. The lesson here: Work doesn’t pay.

But it should. So Bernstein and Cauthen proposed a series of changes both in determining who really is below the poverty line and how the nation should address this crisis. And a crisis it is: 20 percent of America’s kids live in low-income families with at least one parent working full-time, according to Cauthen.

FULL story at link.

[bluestateguy]

1. If Babs Ehrenreich cares so much about the poor, I wonder why she voted for Nader in 2000

That was sure helpful to poor people.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. I dream of the ruling class being overthrown

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. I dream of the ruling class becoming universal

A country needs rulers, which means that the class of people who have a chance of becoming rulers is always going to be needed; what one should endeavour to do is to arrange matters so that everyone is in that class.

The objective of any sane class struggle should be the elimination of the poor as a class, not of the rich.

[Boojatta]

3. The lesson: "work doesn't pay" or "don't have two kids if you earn only $8/hour"?

When the original welfare reform bill was proposed , it contained $100 million for chastity training.

This addition to the welfare reform bill, Ehrenreich notes, reflected the ruling class’s preoccupation with the sexual and social habits of the poor. She also might have added, such a misplaced emphasis purposely ignores the structural economic conditions behind poverty.

Cauthen cites the example of a not-so-hypothetical single mother with two children living in Chicago working full-time at an $8-an-hour job.

The lesson here: Work doesn’t pay.

[PDJane]

4. New Zealand........

little New Zealand, the one with the problems with the IMF and various debt, has a minimum wage of 11.25 per hour.

Australia is at $13.75 AUD per hour.

Jack Layton is working on a ten dollar per hour minimum wage for Canada, federally. We have raised the minimum wage in Ontario to 8.00, and there is discussion of a further raise to 10.00 per hour.

This puts the US at the bottom end of the pay scales, and it would be better for all concerned if the minimum wage were more equal all over the world. Europe's wages show wide gaps, but when taxes and spending power is fatored in, the gap decreases.

There is no such equalizing power in the US and Canada.

[Prophet 451]

6. Britain

I just checked ours, we're at $11.28 by today's exchange rate.

[killbotfactory]

5. Work all your life and stay poor. The American Dream.

[Vidar]

8. No problem. I can't afford the viagra.